“Yes, that is so,” returns Claude’s companion, when our young friend has remarked the curious features of the scene before him. “What you notice is just what is the chief characteristic of an Australian moonlight scene. The only real poet Australia’s ever had was Lindsay Gordon. He was an Englishman, by-the-bye, and he has the same sort of weird touch running through all his poems. But it isn’t so much to my mind,”—the speaker rubs his chin thoughtfully,—“it isn’t that the moonlight is different here to what it is elsewhere, I fancy, so much as it is that Nature herself puts on an outlandishly-awful, God-forsaken, ghastly kind of rig-out, when left to herself in these wilds.”
“That’s very true,” responds Claude, looking at the dreary scene of broken sandstone cliff and dead forest through which their horses are picking their way.
“Now, really, Mr. Angland, what a devilish nightmare of a place this ‘outside’ country is. Look at those ghostly, white-stemmed gums. I’ve heard those trees groan like dying men when there was hardly a breath of air moving. Why, there! you can hear them for yourself now. And, like all their kind, at midday they cast no shadow; and therefore might well be considered bewitched, if we went by the old standard of ancient European justice, that considered this infringement of the natural laws the very earmark of Satan’s cattle. Look at our deserts, our old volcanoes, our fishes that run about on the shore like mice, our rivers of sand, and—but we need not go farther than our wild animals. What artist—Griset, Doré, or any one else—ever conceived a more impish brute than the dingo, or a more startling caricature of a deer with grasshopper’s legs than we find in the kangaroo?”
The dree wail of some neighbouring dingoes upon the distant hills comes as a sort of unearthly murmur of acquiescence, as the speaker closes his remarks.
“Why, really,” remarks Claude, laughing quietly, “now that you point it out, there is really something curiously nightmare-like about Australian nature.” He adds after a pause, “You would be a grand hand at telling a ghost story.”
The two men canter over a smooth piece of country in silence; and when their horses have again come within easy speaking distance, “the Squire” asks Claude if he would like to hear a ghost yarn.
“I’m touchy, rather,” goes on “the Squire,” “on the subject of this the only ghost that I have ever seen; and I give you warning you mustn’t scoff at me for believing in it. I haven’t told any one about it since,—well, it don’t matter when. You’re not in a hurry to get to the station, I suppose?”
“Oh, the yarn, by all possible means!” assents Claude.
But his companion does not hear the reply to his question, for as he loosens the flood-gates of his memory there rushes vividly before his mind a long-forgotten scene, like a weird picture from a magic lantern, shutting out all external things,—a scene of moonlit rock and dark, gloomy trees, of sleeping cattle, of wild and awful midnight terror.
But it is only for an instant. Then he pulls himself together, and half unconsciously lifts his hand to wipe away the cold dew that even the memory of that fearful night has called forth upon his brow.